Inside the Bruins: No messing with this magic

Monday

Nov 21, 2011 at 12:01 AM

The Boston Bruins may have finished off the sweep of their five-game homestand with a pair of less-than-ideal victories, but they took their game to the road with the upside of those wins in the correct perspective.

MICK COLAGEO

The Boston Bruins may have finished off the sweep of their five-game homestand with a pair of less-than-ideal victories, but they took their game to the road with the upside of those wins in the correct perspective.

Winning without their best stuff translated not into complacency but into confidence Saturday on Long Island, where the Bruins put a 6-0 hurt on the New York Islanders.

There was neither a letdown nor a premature threshold for satisfaction, and it was easy to see before the Bruins began filling the net behind Rick DiPietro that they were about to.

The onslaught reminded me of how the circa '83 Islanders typically looked in Game 1 of the playoffs — when they'd turn it on like a light switch following a shoddy regular season. Only the five worst teams in the NHL failed to make the playoffs in the 21-team era of the Isles' four championships and the five titles that Edmonton won in their wake.

The two dynasties' regular-season beatability deluded teams that thought they had enough to win (ie. Bruins). But in April New York would need just three shifts of hockey to remind everyone who the champs were and how hard it was going to be to wrestle away the Stanley Cup.

The image of John Tonelli buzzing on the forecheck and shouldering Washington defensemen off the puck comes to mind. Bumps and lumps from New York's forwards were standard punishment before Mike Bossy got his magical stick on the puck and put it in the net. Hard hits, harder passes and the NHL's quickest draw. When the games began to mean something, the Islanders smelled blood and all hands were on deck.

The politics of the regular season are far different in a 30-team, salary-cap league driven by parity, and intense effort is a necessary staple of any team's run through the regular 82. But on Saturday the Bruins were better than that. On Saturday, they looked exactly like champions and at a time and place when and where it would have been easy not to.

Up in Montreal, the New York Rangers saw their seven-game winning streak go up in smoke, and the Canadiens would obviously love nothing more than an encore performance before the Bell Centre crowd tonight. Faceoff is at 7:30 on NESN, but Versus's has switched the national coverage over to Islanders at Pittsburgh as Sidney Crosby makes his season debut.

Meantime, impending restricted free agent David Krejci has yet to sign a core-player contract, and speculation abounds that the 25-year-old centerman may be available in a trade.

Last spring, Krejci led the league in playoff goal scoring. What would cause the Bruins to decide that he's not a player they want to sign long term?

Answer: Tyler Seguin.

Remember that GM Peter Chiarelli signed Marc Savard to a long-term contract, only to shop him when the draft pick that would ultimately yield Seguin materialized. Savard's is a complex and sad story for another day, but that history should not be ignored when weighing the possibilities here.

Krejci's slow start was more Nathan Horton's doing. (And didn't Horton just channel Mark Messier in Uniondale? When that guy is dictating rather than responding to the pace of the game, he is dangerous like Messier was dangerous.) Then Krejci got injured and needed some time before his skating and puck-handing through the middle of the rink — so essential to his mojo, that explosive step from blue line to blue line — came back. Meantime, the Bruins' workhorses won the battle of influence over the underachievers, the team found itself and originally planned lines were restored. Since those two unfocused losses to Montreal that closed out October, there's been no looking back for the Boston Bruins.

Krejci's back, Horton's back and Milan Lucic has been pretty good most of the time. As it happened in the playoffs, when that line is going, the rest of the league had better watch out because the rest of Boston's game is the most consistent in the league.

As an aside, facing Montreal tonight is an excellent test: instead of going into that Oct. 27-29 home-and-home searching for motivation and letting the usual adrenaline rush produce their dumbest hockey, the Bruins arrive at this stage a more humble team, with a mentality similar to their 2011 playoff march.

The Bruins always knew what made them tick, but everyone's pulling the same way now and we've got ourselves the kind of Bruins-Canadiens game we always hope for.

So back to Krejci:

The Savard scenario and Seguin's sophomore surge advise us not to dismiss the possibility that Chiarelli is holding off on signing Krejci to a core-player contract so he can weigh his options (ie. Seguin's defensive play and assist on Patrice Bergeron's goal Saturday made him look ready to play center in the NHL). That said, Chiarelli tends not to trade from a position of strength.

Jerome Iginla and Rick Nash have been linked to Krejci in speculation stories. It may make sense for Calgary or Columbus to trade a superstar winger dying on the vine for a top-line center to rebuild around, but the Bruins are unlikely to consider such a swap unless the wheels are coming off their own regular season and a playoff spot is in doubt.

And it isn't the eight straight wins that make that so hard to imagine, it's the way Boston is winning. The Bruins are playing Claude Julien hockey, and that means every little detail of each individual's game is intensely cultivated and committed to. Each player owns his patch of ice, and every opponent has to pay a price to compete for it. It's industrial and machine like, but it's beautiful to watch.

Chiarelli spoke patience when the season started and has remained patient. While we endorse trading from a position of strength, Chiarelli has earned the luxury of waiting on Krejci, waiting on Seguin and waiting on his team to see if a serious need emerges (ie. winning makes Joe Corvo look good, but is he really the answer here?).